Auto populate citation numbers

Help! I have over 200 citations to insert and at the moment I’m having to do these manually (JATS xml coming soon to import). Each citation helpfully/unhelpfully is auto populated with the next sequential number. However, when citations are (for some reason) not in order, I cannot add them for the auto numbering is too clever. Suggestions/work around? TIA

Hi there, we’re also interested in automatizing the importing of citations into pubpub, and any recipe/suggestion/example would be much appreciated.